First we take a look at the biological aspect, which means we primarily look how our body works. The building block of all known living organisms is the cell and a human body has somewhere in the range of 10 to 100 trillion of those. The exact number is unknown and this fact should give us much fodder to think. How can we not know what cells constitute us, if this body is something that we commonly consider to be the "I"? The reason for this uncertainty is simply that at every moment millions, if not billion cells die and others come into existence through the division of other cells.

In fact, the body does not appear to be a closely defined collection of material. We add substance to our body by eating, these materials are processed and supply the material for cells to grow and divide. Other cells that have reached the end of their duty cycle are washed out of the body and left behind, some of this material is flushed down the toilet but another part is just spread into the environment - sweat, dandruff, hair, dead skin cells are the reason that we have to vacuum or sweep, and have to wash these left-overs out of our clothes.

The idea about food that many of us have is simply not correct. We do not just put some material into our body and it comes out after some energy has been extracted, instead much of the material is built into our body for a while, does its job for some period of time and is then released. The following picture of our body is much more correct: it is some space, or volume, moving through life, continuously feeding new material into it as it moves through it, and at the same time leaving the same amount as a cloud behind. If we add to this the fact that we are exchanging a huge amount of material with the environment in the form of the air we breathe, it becomes clear that the idea that our body is a clearly defined object that we can identify with, is simply not correct.

Our body is in constant exchange with it's environment and it has been calculated once that there are at least a few atoms or molecules in our body that have been in Jesus's body a few thousand years ago. Also, calculating the amount of material that enters and leaves out body every day, we come to the result that every seven years we have a completely new body. The body you have today consists of nearly 100% different atoms than the ones you had seven years ago. This rate of renewal is even faster for the soft tissues of your body as for example your heart - you heart today is a different one than the one you had two to three years ago.

Since science learned about DNA, at least we know that our essence is carried in these strands of molecules that each of our cells contains and which gives them the ability to apparently maintain our body's integrity - so that we know who we are.

Unfortunately for that point of view we now have to look for the guests we carry with us. Most of us have learned in school that there are beneficial bacteria in our digestive tract helping us to digest the food we eat. From these classes we probably kept this image in our mind of a few of those symbionts living with us. But this picture is not quite right, unfortunately. Foreign cells living in and on our body outnumber our own cells by a very high number - possibly in the range of ten to one!

The idea of our body being that one stable thing that allows us to identify ourselves gets weaker and weaker, if in this confined space that IS our body only ten percent actually carries our own DNA, and the rest are just other entities that life in harmony with our own cells but are definitely not the "I".

Let's summarize what your body actually is: it is a particularly shaped space that is filled to a big degree with water, but also contains cells, ten percent of which I consider my own because they contain my own DNA. These cells are constantly duplicating themselves, live for a little while, then die and will be eventually expelled.

Beyond this biological view, we then have to take the physical view and understand that the molecules and atoms these cells are built from, are mostly empty space with a few vibrating energy strings - possibly curled up in the very small dimensions number 4 to 10 - in the middle.

This is getting pretty wild, yes?

The question now becomes, how these cells - foreign and our own - know where to go and what role to fulfill.

Science has not, as far as this author can discern, provided an answer. Thus we have to move into the area of speculative science. Could it be that the behavior is similar to that on the very smallest scale - the strings of string theory? There we have vibrating energy fields of the smallest size creating, or manifesting, all the particles we know from particle physics, all depending on the frequency of this vibration. Just as the vibration of the strings open up a space that then contains the manifestation of a quark, for example, could it be that there is some energy or vibration that creates, or open up, the space that is then filled with the matter that we consider our body?

One observation of an instant healing did make this theory plausible. This author learned of a very lively, big dog, a Collie, running around and having the best time, until, after one poorly executed jump, caming down, hitting the ground the wrong way. She was lying there very still with one limb very much out of position. The owner told me later that he already saw in his mind all the trouble of getting his dog to the veterinarian, possible surgery and all the cost involved. But the dog, all of a sudden, shook her whole body violently as if getting everything back into place and ran off as if nothing had happened. Apparently this energy field, which was the dog, knew where everything was supposed to be and instantly shook everything into its proper place.

In pursuing the question what the characteristic of this energy field might be, we will have to move deeper into the speculative domain, when we explore different types of universes.